In order for a computer to communicate with an operator, a computer program often includes messages that are selectively displayed to the operator to communicate the requirement for further inputs or the results of some process. As computer programs tend to become more "user friendly", the number of messages employed by the program will increase in order to facilitate communications with the user. As the number of messages increase, the memory storage required by the computer program also increases. Therefore, there exists a need to efficiently provide messages to the user without overburdening the computer storage facilities.
A technique used for efficiently employing memory storage is data or text compression. One method of text compression is disclosed in the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 1B, June, 1981, entitled "Text Compaction by Word Mapping", which discusses Huffman coding and a word mapping technique that is used to access letters or symbols efficiently when retrieving text.
A second technique is disclosed in the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 9, Feb., 1982, entitled "Message and Menu Tables Compaction/Compression", that discloses a technique for accessing messages using character symbolic names. This technique uses several tables that define different attributes of each message. Compaction of the text is accomplished by recognizing redundancy of data in the messages and then providing the data only once in a table. The redundant data is represented by variable length code words.
Another message compression technique is disclosed in IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 23, No. 9, Feb., 1981, entitled "Message Compression Method"that discusses the use of local memory to store portions of compressed message symbol strings wherein special commands in the compressed message string provide an address to a pointer that points to a local memory location including the often used symbol or symbols.
A further message compression technique is disclosed in IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 12, May, 1985, entitled "Vocabulary-Based Memory Compression". This disclosure discusses the use of a read-only memory (or read-only storage) to store several universally used words. Additionally, the computer will include a random access memory (RAM) that is used to store words that are unique to a document to be provided by the computer. By providing the universally used words in ROM. These often used words do not have to be stored in RAM but may be recalled by the their ROM address. When a document is processed, this universal word memory is used to allow coding of the commonly used words. These codes require much less memory space than do the words themselves. Therefore, by using the universal word ROM, messages can be stored in less memory space than if the words were not encoded.
A further aspect of message file structure includes the requirement that the message file be easily accessible for translation when a program is to be used in foreign countries. In other words, the messages contained in the computer program should be easily accessible so that these words may be translated into corresponding words of a foreign language enabling computer operators in a foreign country to use the program.
The object of the present invention is to provide a method of forming message files to efficiently use computer memory while providing access to the words of the messages for language translation.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a method for reforming the messages stored in the message file structure described above.